In the film The Postino, the village postman gives the girl he loves a poem he passes off as his own though it has been written by Pablo Neruda, living in exile in a small Italian community. When Neruda berates the postman, the young man replies: "Just because you wrote the poem, that doesn't mean it belongs to you. Poetry belongs to those who need it."

Patent attorneys may be scandalised by such a laissez-faire interpretation of copyright laws. But by his response, the postman reveals that he might have a greater insight into the nature and ownership of poetry than the poet himself. Who does 'own' poetry? The person who creates it? Or those who make it a part of a common legacy with which to give utterance to voiceless longings? To whom does the fragrance of the rose belong? The flower, or the passing traveller enraptured by its scent?

As a struggling writer in Buenos Aires, Borges would enter workingmen's bars and slip unsigned copies of his writings into the pockets of jackets hanging by the door. Nor would he hang about outside, to see what fate befell his clandestine literary offerings. Borges had realised that what a writer writes lives on the sheet of silence that is another's mind.

If this is true of poets and writers, who must deal with the clumsy pen-and-ink limitations of their craft, how much more so for the spiritual masters? "Please go from here. Go away and don't listen to me," J Krishnamurti would exhort the disciples who flocked to hear him speak.

Like Borges, or the Italian postman, Krishnamurti knew that what he had to say had no meaning unless others took it away from him and made it into their own, each according to their individual needs. Truth is subjectivity. To the extent you absorbed, or internalised someone else's teachings, you expropriated what was taught, taking from it what you needed.